Imagine a picture puzzle.... It comes in a box filled with
hundreds of pieces. When assembled, it may depict a landscape, perhaps,
with large swatches of blue sea and blue sky. Imagine my mind is like
one of those picture puzzles, and so is yours. I take one of those blue
puzzle pieces, give it to you, and declare, “Here's a bit of
the picture in my mind. I give it to you so you can see the picture I
see.”

I don't do book reviews

Books. I like 'em. I read a lot of them.

Often I recommend them to others. (Perhaps you noticed?)

Unfortunately I suspect my recommendations might be more effective if
I could muster the willpower to write detailed, enthusiastic reviews.
As much as I enjoy books, and as much I want others to appreciate the good ones,
I greatly dislike writing book reviews. They remind me too much of book reports
and school homework assignments.

Reading a book is fun. Writing about it takes time away from reading
the next one.

As a kid in fourth grade I went on strike over book reports. I refused
to write them. Specifically, I declined to participate in a classroom contest
to try to write more book reports than the other kids. It seemed pretty clear
to me that the contest was designed to get some (many?) of the kids to read more.
The prospect of gold stars and smiley stickers on a wall chart (or the prize,
whatever it was) didn't offer much incentive to me. I already averaged about
four books checked out of the library at a time.

My civil disobedience prompted an emergency parent-teacher conference.
Although I didn't exactly prevail, we did negotiate a concession: I agreed
to stop setting an example of disobedience in exchange for the teacher's
acknowledgement that the contest wasn't likely to advance my education.
*

Now I have better incentive to write book reports reviews. I want other
people to benefit from useful books as much I have. I want other people
to read those books. But book reviews still feel like homework to me,
and writing them does take time away from reading them.

Unfortunately the statement, “You should read this book because
I say so”, doesn't seem to work very well.

I often think of books as tool boxes filled with idea tools. I have
some background in engineering so that feels like a natural and obvious approach.
For me, recommending a particular book is like recommending a particular tool
for a particular task.

“Hi, there. I see you're pounding that nail
with a brick.
How's that workin' for ya? Have you considered a hammer instead? I just happen
to have a hammer right here.”

Most models are wrong, but some are useful. Good books are full of ideas.
Some of them are wrong, but some of them are useful. There are many I might
recommend to a particular person in a particular situation. There are a few I
recommend widely because they're especially versatile. These are my
Swiss Army, Leatherman, toolbox-in-paperback, recommended books:

Ten significant books

Greensmile
asked me to participate
in a blog conversation about books that have been significant to me. He
also asked whether the word “meme” comes from
“Me me!” Susan Blackmore, who studies memes and
writes extensively about them, might agree that it does,
in a way.

A meme is an idea that
spreads. That's my working definition, a model I find useful.
It's an inexact copy of Susan
Blackmore's definition. Meme
ideas spread by imitation, by exact copying and inexact copying. Memes
can be melodies, catch-phrases, stories, clothing fashions, and ways of
making pots. Many memes spread unintentionally in the course of casual
conversation and story-telling. Bloggers deliberately spread some memes
as ways to inspire new posts.

I like this particular
blog meme. It offers opportunities to think about books that influence
our lives, such as:

Ishmael
would have worked, too,
but it was not on the library shelf that day. Both are entry points to
a library of astonishing insights into our culture's operation.

2. One book you have read more than once?

The Shockwave Rider,
by John Brunner. It was also the book that changed my life the first time, and
one of many that created a context to understand and to value the ideas
of Daniel Quinn, Peter
Senge, and George Lakoff.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

Some big, thick anthology of relatively recent literature,
such as the one I bought for an American Lit class a couple of decades
ago.

A number of meme writers already have mentioned practical
books about desert island survival. I'll figure out the edible plants
by cautious tasting. I'd rather share an indefinite future with
e e cummings
and Stephen Crane
and Mark Twain.

Initially I misread that as a book I wish I, personally, had
written. And that would be Meet Me
in the Moon Room, by Ray
Vukcevich. I can't even describe how wonderfully Vukcevich writes, but this
guy tries...

Other meme writers have mentioned books that seem to inspire
legions of readers to behave badly. We all know the adage about judging
books by their covers. I do find some value in judging books by their readers.

8. One book you are currently reading?

(orginal response) I sometimes borrow a backpack full of books at one time from
a nearby university library. The nonfiction ones I graze for good
ideas. The fiction I read to be impressed by writing style, such as The Toughest Indian in the World,
by Sherman Alexie.

I skimmed Meyerson's book. It looks good, and I'll read it thoroughly
some day. I'm waiting for these to become available: Risk Society, by Ulrich Beck; and Destroying Dogma, a look at Vine Deloria's career.

Two worth reading

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I've been planning
to recommend Ursula K. Le Guin's delightful book,
Changing Planes, since I
discovered it a few weeks ago. The reward for procrastination is an
opportunity to pair it with Jose Saramago's unusual book,
The Cave.

Changing Planes presents itself
as a sly travelogue, a collection of short stories that describe some
of the planes of existence a traveler can reach after experiencing the
peculiar combination of stress, boredom, and indigestion that occurs only
in a modern airport.

The book's back cover blurb observes that Le Guin's
stories of exotic
places and peoples all reflect the here and now of 21st century life.
Most notable for me were the perpetually annoyed and squabbling people
of Veks, the reckless genetic experiments on Islac, the thoughtful people
of Ansarac who took some bad advice but abandoned it for their own
time-tested wisdom, and the sad holiday island of Great Joy.

While searching Le Guin's web site
for supplementary links I noticed her recommendation of Nobel prize-winner
Jose Saramago's books, Seeing,
Blindness, and
The Cave. The titles
Seeing and
Blindness caught my eye
because I've written a bit myself about
seeing and not seeing.
Saramago's writing style may challenge us, but readers who appreciate
William Faulkner's page-long streams of consciousness should be
equally comfortable with Saramago's technique.
What Saramago's charming characters discover deep within
The Cave is both disturbing
and liberating:

Libraries are marvelous resources. They offer a no-risk way to evaluate
books without the need to purchase and store them permanently. But when
we know we want to keep a book permanently...

One simple way to improve the economy around us is to buy locally from an
independent bookstore rather than a big-box chain store. Money spent at
locally-owned businesses tends to stay within our communities where it
directly benefits us and our neighbors. Money spent at chain stores tends
to leave town quickly, never to be seen again. BookSense is an excellent
web resource to help find books locally.

Unfortunately the BookSense web site
is not such a good source of easily-linked book reviews. So I use
Powell's instead.
Powell's is not local to me, but it's independent and has a good reputation
for supporting progressive and environmentally-responsible attitudes.

I take that piece from the sky portion
of my mind's picture puzzle, but you find it fits best in the sea
portion of yours.

“Thanks!” you say,
as you join my sky piece to your sea puzzle. And off we go, cheerfully
believing we have accomplished something, that we have communicated.

George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The single biggest
problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken
place.”

Sometimes I think of it as the illusion of information. If I
hand you a blue puzzle piece from the picture in my mind, but I don't
describe the surrounding picture from which it came, I set up both of
us to misunderstand each other, to miscommunicate, to see only an
illusion of information.

This site offers a collection of puzzle pieces. These are the
pieces I find most helpful to create a coherent picture of the world
around us.